AI has had like 14 Chernobyl moments. Wasn't the US using AI to bomb Iran? That include a whole school of girls IIRC. And guess what? No one cares.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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While I agree with you, the vast majority of users are still AI pilled.
Those users are what they are scared of loosing.
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Chernobyl spread significant radiation over 8 million people with effects lasting for decades / generations. It spread detectable radiation across most of the globe.
I truly feel for the tragedy of the schoolgirls, but as Stalin said: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Chernobyl was a statistic level event, so many individual tragedies that people can't feel them anymore.
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All of these articles are for ai companies. Ooh, look at our scary powerful ai's. We're defenitly super close to agi. Please giv e us more money.
You really don't think there could be a possibility of a horrific consequence if AI is given the responsibility of managing real world systems?
Of course that's a possibility, but AI does not have responsibility. The question is who does?
Do I blame a train for hitting someone who steps onto railroad tracks when there's a train approaching? It's a machine. It doesn't have responsibilities or opinions or agency. It does what it has been built to do, in exactly the manner that anyone with sufficient understanding of its operating principles could tell you, because that's what machines do. The person or persons interacting with the machine is not absolved of any responsibility by how complex or inscrutable the machine is. It's still a machine.
The question is, who is responsible for the person stepping onto the railroad tracks when there was a train approaching? Was the person trying to end their own life? Maybe it's their responsibility. Or maybe the crossing signals failed and told them it was safe, and they did not realize a train was approaching. Maybe there were too many trees or signs or construction that was blocking their view. Is the train company responsible for that? Maybe. Did the brakes fail due to poor inspections or substandard work during the last maintenance? Maybe. Did the train have plenty of time to stop and the engineer was not paying attention? Maybe. These are all people, and groups of people, who may have responsibility. The only thing that's certain is: The train doesn't.
We, as a society, need to decide who is responsible for the possibility of a horrific consequence arising from the use of these sort of machines. Is it the person using the machine? The people who made the machine in the first place? The people who put it in a place where this person could easily use it? By assigning responsibility, ideally in advance of any horrific consequences, that provides a clear incentive for the people we deem responsible to actually start acting responsible and take the appropriate measures to avoid such horrific consequences that they might be held responsible for.
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Chernobyl blew up because they were dicking around with an unsafe design.
This analogue is very apt.
An unsafe design that wasnt even fully tested.
Still bang on.
How about they stop building the torment nexus?
Torment does not create torment. It's being created by the torment factory within the nexus. Nexus was not valued.
This take is a denial of current reality.
They're already using "AI" for genocide in Palestine, etc.
This is how capitalism always develops and uses "technology".
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Delusional take. We, the people pretty much hate AI already. We hate how it‘s utilized against us.
People weren't wildly supportive of nuclear power before Chernobyl / TMI either, but after? 40 years of virtual moratorium on new construction in most of the world, absolute rollback in Germany. We've continued to poision ourselves with coal and wreck the climate with CO2 instead of learning to do nuclear right. If building of new plants weren't so difficult, older and less stable plants like Fukushima could have been decomissioned before having major problems.
Except in this case, we're turning down the advancement of a technology that hurts humanity in every conceivable way and poisons the environment.
a technology that hurts humanity in every conceivable way and poisons the environment.
That's how I feel about Bitcoin, which, by the way, STILL consumes more energy in its datacenters than AI.
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AI vibecoded nuclear plant. What could go wrong? You just need to add "no nuclear meltdown" at the end of the prompt.
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Wait, so its not the actual event and ensuing casualties that have AI researchers spooked, but the fact that it might cause the public to turn against AI?
"Sir, our model has caused several explosions around the globe resulting in hundreds of thousands dead and people rioting against us."
"No! MY PROFIT!"
(I wish I could add an /s.)
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It's like responding to your employee losing an arm, ripped off by your tiger, and saying "I'm never going to financially recover from this."
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This "AI is inevitable" mindset is the most rapey shit ever.
"Top AI researcher" I can no longer read those words without Doofy voice 😂
Probability of unhinged techbro bs is around 115%
They're always going on about how dangerous their AI is.
"Our hey I found 3,000 0-day security vulnerabilities in top software, we're only giving it to top software companies so that they can patch their products before we release"
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I’ll worry about ‘AI’ when something that can legitimately be mistaken as intelligence is demonstrated.
In the meantime, these explosively imprecise, statistically luke-warm, grey goo extrusion sphincters need to be exclusively opt-in, and not forced on anyone who hasn’t explicitly consented to a lobotomy.
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That implies an actual AI when the truth is in current form human error using the tool behind it.
Personally I am more concerned by it will be used by design of the techbros who are pretty open in their desire to be rid of some of the masses. Supporting emerging wars just masks their part….for now.
I don't think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a "Chernobyl Moment" maybe almost literally.
We have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn't seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn't and starts to hallucinate?
If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)
Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I've already seen that idea being floated)
Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.
Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two
Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight
If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI
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Top AI resear her should go fuck themselves right to hell.
The thing about Chernobyl was that it was, ultimately, an unwanted mistake.
The thing about AI is that the shitty mass casualty outcome seems like the intended outcome.
Chernobyl: A massive catastrophic accident during testing and shift changes.
AI: A massive catastrophic accident intentionally caused by corporate greed and capitalism
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It’s a probability machine, not actual intelligence. If it’s given too much power it’s bound to happen sooner or later.
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"turns the world against AI forever"?? It already has, you don't have to be a "researcher" to come to that conclusion.
Sounds like what Alex Karp tells retail investors. A lot more people got killed by AI than by Chernobyl by the way.
No worries, it seems companies are very eager to make this happen sooner than later 👍
It could already be happening. The likelihood could even be higher than not.
It doesn't necessarily need to be a single event. There are already AI systems being sold in healthcare. Even pre-LLMs. Who's to say these system are being closely monitored and studied. There could statistically be patients who have died or been maimed who otherwise wouldn't if they had real human professionals instead of someone who used a system that was sold on the doctors office.
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That’ll happen when they turn over some piece of critical infrastructure or something over to AI. Power, stock market, something that will affect tens or hundreds of millions of people and wreck lives or even kill people.
Nonetheless these clowns will push for it because profit, and some fool politicians will OK it because campaign money.
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Did someone say creating fake news in masses to scare people away from genAI?
Count me in!
Aren't we like 38000 years ahead of that thing? Oh, and Praise the omnissaiah!
Only a matter of time. We don't need to worry about Terminator and Skynet. We need worry about everything going from engineered to automated cargo cult slop. All run on massive datacenters controlled by a few mega corporation that everyone is hopelessly dependent on and can't imagine working without. The trillionaire owners of these mega corporations are hiding in bunkers waiting on one of coming calamities to happen, or just from us unwashed masses. While they buy governments and media to keep and increases their riches.
This future sucks. Can I try another one?
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Well that sounds pretty horrible and I would to avoid it...
But if thats all it costs, then...
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We could start the Butlerian Jihad early, i wouldn't mind
The majority of the world is already against AI. These jackasses need to pull their head out of their ass and come up for air.
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Yahoo!tech digging deep for a story there.
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